Hey all!
Rincus here :) thanks for taking the time to check out the page for the first game I’ve ever made.
On April 14th, me and my partner Scrongus started learning Unity for the first time ever. Needless to say: what a whirlwind adventure. We're so proud of the outcome, and it was so inspiring watching our fellow jammers push themsleves. Thanks for helping us be the best us we could be.
Seeing the active community inspired me to write a little Post Mortem! Hopefully the lessons we learned can help our fellow game devs, and I think writing them out is gonna help me and scrongus grow too.
Anyways! Our post mortem has 3 sections. Our plans for the full game, what we learned (and received feedback on), and what we're proud of. Here it is:
Future Plans:
•We think that GASP is at its best when the game is claustrophobic and intense. We find our favorite moments to be in closed rooms with multiple exits. We think a couple of these changes could take the game closer to a more intense, "breath-taking" pace:
-reduce monster’s cone of “vision”, or remove it entirely. So that the player can inch by them in a tight room, and that it can feel like fair game play.
-at the same time, reduce the speed of sprinting, slightly increase walking. We realized we could evoke the same feeling as the horror movie Don’t Breathe or the "room searching scene" from The Raid: Redemption so that it’s like a running game of inches rather than miles, evading a blind but intelligent foe.
-Use audio cues and visual cues to give a stronger idea of when the player is in a danger zone, and encourage them to inch out of the way instead of running clear across the map.
•Add in more custom art, add in stronger teaching elements
-We really like the grayscale theme of the game - for us it really recalls the way an anxiety attack or mental health struggle can feel. However, we feel that smoother level geometry could help to make the color scheme feel intentional rather than a “gray boxed” level. So going forward, we want to add more custom and intentional geometry to the levels.
-We think that the mash up of game elements can be challenging in its ambitious nature, and we intend to add a lot more player teaching and a smoother introduction of mechanics to the game. Longer tutorial, showing one control at a time, and cementing the nature of breathing/running/noises and how they’re intertwined.
-The monster’s visuals will get a big update, as our planned rig for the monster couldn’t be finished in time :’)
•More Levels, more audio, more content
-We spent so much time during the jam creating dynamic systems, so creating the levels was super fast, and we have many ideas on how to add a lot of content.
-We think a big kick of game feel could do wonders for the game. More audio surrounding the monster, audio telling you when the exit doors have opened, dynamic audio changes to shift with tone.
-There are elements of the story we didn’t have time to rig as cinematics that we’re really excited to add. The mental health theme of the game is very important to us, and we have a couple key narrative elements we want to add to drive home the feeling that the player is finding their comfort and warmth from the world.
What we Learned / What we would have done differently:
•Test the game on different systems!
-We should’ve scheduled more time early on to make sure the game was running optimally on different systems. Halfway through the jam, having bugs happen only on certain systems took a day of our time to resolve. Ultimately, we overcame the issue, but it meant less time and energy for other areas we would’ve loved to iterate further on.
•Playtest playtest playtest!
-We’re so happy to be getting your feedback now. We love growing and getting better. It would’ve been nice to queue up playtesters for the middle of the jam so that we could’ve adapted some of the feedback even faster.
New systems are hard!
-Not only was this our first time using C#, we also tried to use some more advanced (for us) concepts like dynamic lists, and coroutines, and C# events. Sometimes we lost time to making an advanced system work through a boggling bug rather than use two lines of janky code. But at the end of the day, what matters is the game, and the janky code would’ve made the game better, faster.
Simplicity! Brevity!
-If we had one more day to jam, the entire day would be focused on simplifying and communicating. We think that once learned, this game has some very high highs. Our next goal as designers with this game would’ve been building the metaphorical ladder to help new players organically reach those highs. A slower introduction curve of mechanics, a chance to learn about how noises work, a visual breakdown of the controls and buttons and iconography, as well as an interactive tutorial.
What we’re super proud of:
•Originally (for the entire first half of the jam), the game had a Birds Eye perspective. Taking the risk of refactoring the game to first person and being decisive ultimately pushed it over the edge for us into being a really exciting premise, and we think it’s the best decision we made under pressure.
•A lot of the code is scalable. It may not have been smart for the purpose of a jam to create complex systems, but we’re so excited at how easy updating this proof of concept will be.
•At one point, we had to make a big call: do we emphasize making one perfect level, and call it a demo? Or try to finish a game with a start and ending. It’s a subjective choice, but we’re happy that we chose to make a game that could be played from start to finish without extra context. It was a big change up for us, as we have historically made vertical slices in order to hone our skills. But having to learn particle systems, and coding narrative elements, creating a real main menu - its made us proud that we have something that explains itself and can be played without us standing in the room. It meant a little less time towards refining controls, or perfecting teaching the players the controls, or perfecting one level - but for us as game devs, this is something that’s pushed us to learn more and add more to our skill set. Having a beginning and ending pushed us outside our comfort zone, so we learned a lot of new things.
•The community! This was our first experience being around other game devs, and seeing the friendliness, the feedback, the passion, the love, and the mutual effort just makes us so inspired. We’re really proud to be here and to communicate with you.
Thank you for everyone’s feedback, ratings, and time so far! And thank you for reading!All of your energy is appreciated as we hear it out on our journey to become better game devs every day :) and I’m so excited to read your own post mortems.
Best,
Rincus (and Scrongus)